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Your eBay feedback score matters. The higher and more positive your feedback score, the more trustworthy you look to buyers, and the more sales you make. Here’s how the system works and how to send your own score through the roof:
Fully updated 3/5/2021.
How Customers See eBay Seller Stars and Feedback Scores
Your feedback score appears on each of your items’ listings. Once you have a feedback score of at least 10, you'll also see a colored eBay star that hints at how successful you’ve been.
In the image above, you can see that the eBay seller account has a red star in the seller information box. That indicates that they have a feedback score of at least 1,000.
Customers can also click on a feedback score to see detailed seller ratings.
Again, if they like what they see, they’ll be much more likely to buy. But how do each of those things work?
Your eBay Feedback Score
While eBay no longer provides this information in their seller ratings guide, your basic score is calculated very simply. A buyer can give you a positive, neutral, or negative rating on a purchase. Positive will give you +1 to your score, negative will give you -1, and neutral won’t affect it.
Your positive feedback percentage works a little differently. If you click the little "i" next to a seller's percentage, you'll see this explanation:
An interesting point is that a single buyer can only move your percentage up or down once in a given week. Previously, eBay also stated that the feedback score worked the same way: one buyer could not increase or decrease your score by more than 1 in a single week. While this has been deleted from their help articles, we believe it still works that way.
eBay Seller Stars
You get a yellow star once your score reaches 10. If a seller has no stars, it means that they haven’t received at least 10 more positive reviews than negative reviews. Generally, they just haven’t sold much yet.
eBay seller stars change color over time, eventually reaching green. Then they turn into shooting stars and go back to yellow again. The highest possible ranking is a silver shooting star for a feedback score of at least 1 million.
Read more about eBay stars.
Detailed Seller Ratings
Detailed seller ratings (DSRs) are based on optional reviews that a customer can complete after saying their experience was positive or negative.
DSRs cover four areas:
- How well the item matches the description
- Communication
- Shipping efficiency
- Shipping price
It used to be that too many low DSRs could disqualify you from being a Top Rated Seller. If yours fell low enough, it could even result in punishments like restrictions on your account.
That's no longer the case. However, good detailed seller ratings help with building customer trust and may even improve your eBay search rankings.
How to Get Positive Feedback on eBay
Detailed seller ratings allow customers to voice exactly why they gave positive or negative feedback. If you can deliver the kind of service that consistently gets five-star ratings in the four DSR categories, you can count on getting a higher eBay feedback score. You can even get automatic five-star ratings in three categories for excellent performance.
Accurate Descriptions
The only rating that is always left up to the customer is how well the item matches the description. Make sure you use accurate photos and describe the product honestly to get good ratings here.
Rapid Communication
The best way to get a good communication score is to not need to communicate at all. You can get an automatic five-star rating if neither you nor the buyer send any messages (besides invoices / invoice requests or Best Offers / Second Chance Offers). However, you will also need to
- offer same-business-day or one-business-day handling,
- upload the tracking information for the order on schedule,
- receive no refund requests through eBay or PayPal Purchase Protection, and
- avoid any "item not received" claims.
Most customers will also give you a great communication score if you respond to their messages quickly. A six-hour response time is ideal, but if that isn’t practical, just reply as soon as you can.
We recommend integrating eBay with a helpdesk in order to streamline your customer support and improve communication times. It's a particularly useful strategy when you're also selling on other platforms like Amazon.
Shipping Efficiency
To get an automatic five-star rating here, you first need to complete the same one-day handling requirements as for communications. The order then needs to be marked as delivered within four days of the customer completing their payment.
You can also expect your customers to give you good ratings if you’re clear about your shipping times and deliver as promised. If you set a range of possible shipping times, such as 3–5 days, do everything you can to deliver earlier rather than later.
Shipping Price
This is the easiest one to get an automatic five-star rating for. All you have to do is offer free shipping. If the customer takes the free shipping option, and you follow through with your promises, then bam, you get five stars.
If free shipping won’t work with your business model, then just charge a fair price. Calculated shipping makes it easy to charge the right amount without forcing you to spend hours figuring out shipping for each item.
For more details on automatic five-star ratings and eBay’s recommendations, visit their selling practices page.
How to Deal with Negative Feedback
Even the best sellers occasionally get bad reviews. Learn how to respond to negative feedback and how to change feedback so you can make the most of a bad situation.
Summary
If you follow all of the tips above, eBay will love you—and so will your customers. Treat buyers the way you would want to be treated and you should have no trouble getting a high score and a fancy star. With just a little luck, you'll soon be a Top Rated Seller.
For more tips on improving your feedback, read up on providing exceptional customer service and learn how to handle eBay returns. You might also want to consider selling on eBay and Amazon at the same time to boost your sales!
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